Godmother Gaga

Did you hear Elton John and husband David Furnish recently adopted a son, Zachary?
And did you hear they named Lady Gaga as the baby’s godmother?
And did you hear twenty years from now Zachary is in jail?

Lady Gaga in meat dress

I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth, but I believe I can safely say, “Great choice, Elton!” on behalf of bad parents everywhere.

I worry this will lower the benchmark for potential godmothers everywhere.  Remember your college roommate, Kandi, who assumed she would be your kid’s godmother, but you had to tell her she couldn’t be in your kid’s life until she went a week without forgetting where she lived?  Kandi doesn’t seem so bad now, does she?

I’m not certain of a godmother’s specific responsibilities, but I sure wish I’d had someone like Godmother Gaga in my life when I was a kid.  Those teenage years can be awkward, and I never had anyone I could ask those embarrassing questions like, “Godmother Gaga, when you were younger, did you ever feel like you wanted to spend a couple days incubating in a giant glowing egg and then emerge to play an organ covered with mannequin heads?”

Dear Baby Zachary, let me be the first to give you some advice: Keep a diary and show it to the judge during your inevitable legal troubles.

Age 7: Birthday party not so fun.  My friends screamed when Gaga jumped out of a giant cake dressed as a cake.  They screamed even louder when a cake dressed as Gaga jumped out of Gaga.

Age 9: I asked for a bicycle for Christmas, but Gaga gave me a Dreamsicle in the shape of a bicycle.  She said it represented melting dreams and how sometimes life seems orange on the outside, but the inside is made from ice milk, and then underneath the ice milk is a wooden stick that can be used for building a miniature fence.  I guess there’s a lot about life I don’t understand yet.  If I had a bike I would ride it to go get another Dreamsicle because mine had melted by the time Gaga had finished explaining its meaning.

Age 11: Kicked off baseball team after Gaga argued with coach that I should be allowed to bat using a French baguette.  She claimed the yeast in the baguette represented the way an athlete rises to heroism and is then lifted up onto the shoulders of his teammates and devoured with butter and cheese.  Not sure she understands the rules of baseball.  Coach finally relented, but she became irate when the umpire called strike one in English instead of  saying, “La prise un!”

Lady Gaga frog dress

Age 12: My slumber party was so embarrassing!  Gaga insisted on playing figurative Truth-or-Dare but with figurative results.  None of us understood the rules, and when my friend Jason complained she literally dared him to figuratively dare her to literally create a physical representation of the figurative impact of the game according to his literal understanding of the figurative rules.   Jason asked if he could go home–literally.

Age 14: I lost my role in the school play after the other actors were traumatized when Gaga came backstage to tell us to “break a leg” while wearing the exhumed skeletal broken legs of acting-great Sir Laurence Olivier.

Age 17: Gaga and Dads grounded me for wearing a polo shirt and slacks to school picture day instead of the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing outfit Gaga picked out.  They said they were disappointed I had chosen to join the crowd and reject the individualist style they had carefully selected for me.

For all I know, Lady Gaga might make a wonderful godmother.  Elton John said of her, “When you get to the real person under there, there’s a real simple person under there who loves her parents.”  And maybe he’s right.  Maybe there is a simple person hidden under that meat dress.  And whether she’s a simple person or not, at the very least baby Zachary will have no problems pronouncing her name.